Well last week was a complete horror show. I came down with a rather nasty cold and it, knocked me out for over a week. A whole week of unending headaches, tension pains, runny noses and flemmy coughs. I was without energy or any sort of intelligance I practically spent the week in front of the television feeling sorry for myself, they must of cut a whole tree down just to cater for the ammount of tissues I had used.

Now back to it. First day I am well enough to work I am off to Rhodes to get VMware training from HP. I find this highly ironic as I think VMware is pretty sucky compared to other hyper visors that area available and that the company I work for only really buy switches from HP and nothing more.

However this is a good opportunity to move further at work and also to learn about a technology that I have a lot of interest in. I just hope the teach can speak english better then your usual run of the mill certificate trainer.

Well I had a good sleep last night, thought about my post yesterday, I think ill try again, I had a pretty defeatist attitude last night I was frustrated and it was really hot. I am going to practice more today and perhaps try again tonight or on the weekend if I have time, I see now the importance of having a room with no distractions I feel like I practice better during my lunch break at my desk then at home, Ill have my “studio” cleaned up this weekend and I will setup a workstation so I can record hopefully.

So I had this great idea today that I would record some of the song I am trying to learn, I have to say wow, listening to yourself is an eye opener, you think you know what you are trying to do and you have spent hours practicing on the same piece day after day, then you try to record it, boy the room got hotter, my fingers fumbled about pressing the wrong keys, I found that my five string was just too big, being that I have practiced on my four string fretless jazz bass.

I decided to change over to my dean signature detonator bass.
A little better but still I was all over the place, it was a real learning experience I learned not only that I need to take more time with my playing, experience and lots more practice will be needed before I attempt to get a piece ready for my site, but It was a great experience to hear myself playing.

So, IOS 5 is now out. Being the silly fool that I am, I tried to update to the latest version.. I now have a very pretty brick sitting on my desk, the restore function just does not work(god I hope time fixes that)

One of the best things to ever come out of apple in my opinion would have to be garage band, it allowed people to spend very minimal amount of money to do what a sound engineer and a many thousands of dollar recording studio could do.

Just about every small band or muso around the world use this excellent piece of software to record and edit their works. it has essentially become the standard for cheap broke bastards such as myself to fiddle and record music. Recently I picked up an ipad, the device itself is excellent from the moment you open the packaging you can see exactly where your money has gone. The build quality is beyond anything anyone else is making.

The first app I purchased for my ipad was garage band, when you see the adds on the television they show you all these cool apps but the one thing that stood out for me was that you could play an instrument on your ipad now this is a great idea if you are on the train and you cannot pull out your 10kg worth of bass guitar and start strumming it much to the annoyance of other peak hour commuters. now admittedly the garage band for the ipad is a cut down version of what you have on your apple mac. but the idea of being able to compose your music seemed like an excellent selling point to purchase this five buck app.

now the app itself does everything advertised. You can record music from an in built mic, you can tune your guitar, you can even attach a device and plug your guitar directly into the ipad. What it does not tell you is that you only have access to the first eight frets on the bass! this is a real frustration. Understandably there is a limitation of space/size on the screen, but even a drag function would of been helpful, it is a real shame that you cannot get up to the twelfth fret on the guitar it would of made it a much more usable tool to compose pieces or practice songs.